The premise (and promise) of Colin Meloy's young adult novel "Wildwood" stirred the imagination: Portland's 5,000-acre Forest Park as an "Impassable Wilderness," closed to almost all outsiders, inhabited by bandits, talking birds, farmers, mystics and, uh, bureaucrats. A hike up the Wildwood Trail will never be quite the same.

Meloy's best-selling chronicle expands with familiar faces and worthy additions in the second installment, "Under Wildwood."

Prue McKeel, the outsider "Bicycle Maiden" who helped save Wildwood from a coyote army and a secret police force the previous autumn, and who rescued her baby brother (captured by crows), now languishes in ... seventh grade. It's February and she's back home in her North Portland neighborhood of St. Johns, but Prue feels the pull of the Impassable Wilderness (I.W.), just across the river.

Prue's friend Curtis remained behind in Wildwood, suffering somewhat different indignities as he undergoes "bandit training," under the tutelage of Brendan the Bandit King. His whereabouts are unknown to his parents, who, desperate to find their son, dash off to Turkey, leaving his sisters Rachel and Elsie behind at a daycare-of-last-resort: the Jeffrey Unthank Home for Wayward Youth and Industrial Machine Parts.

Located in the "Industrial Wastes" of Northwest Portland, Meloy's Unthank Home cleverly co-opts that abandoned gray edifice once home to Portland Gas & Coke Co. just south of the St. Johns Bridge. There, orphaned and discarded children toil at manufacturing machine parts for Mr. Unthank, who wields the threat of rendering them "unadoptable" as he schemes to find a way into the I.W.

Once again, Prue and Curtis and others must heed the call to save Wildwood, this time from a malevolent assemblage of evildoers -- shape-shifting assassins, political upheaval in the South Wood, and Unthank and his fellow Titans of Industry's designs on exploiting the I.W.'s natural resources.

Best known as the lead singer and songwriter of the Decemberists, Meloy's lyrics are routinely (and reflexively) described as "hyper-literate." Songs can obscure the occasional lapse into excessive verbosity, but here on the page?

"It would seem that fortune smiled on Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg that day ... Not only smiled, but also moved in to plant a wet, lazy kiss on their respective foreheads."

A reader doesn't dance around that so much as try to avoid stepping in it. The dialogue and descriptions around Elder Mystic Iphegenia and the other mystics of Wildwood prove particularly treacherous.

But the good news is that both writing and pacing in "Under Wildwood" have improved from the first book, becoming more consistent. Slightly longer (both tally more than 500 pages), this installment whips round robin through multiple storylines and characters. The dark levity of the Unthank School, and the travails of Elsie, Rachel and its orphaned laborers, are a welcome (if unfortunate) addition.

The vision of Wildwood continues to owe a tremendous debt to the gorgeous and whimsical illustrations of Carson Ellis (Meloy's spouse) throughout. Her aesthetic has also helped define the look of the Decemberists' releases, and her work appears on covers for Lemony Snicket's "The Composer Is Dead" and "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart.

Meloy's oeuvre openly embraces his influences, from Irish folk tales to the world of Narnia. Even those who missed the first installment may feel as though they've been here before.

The Unthank Home orphan scenario echoes the abuses heaped upon the Baudelaire children in Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events." Curtis' diminutive yet tenacious rat companion Septimus joins fiction's teeming rodent pantheon, sliding in next to Reepicheep of C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian" and sequels. Plucky heroine Prue McKeel could find a kindred spirit in Lyra Belacqua of Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy, while her ability to communicate with plants recalls the snake-speaking Parselmouths in the Harry Potter books.

But as Meloy demonstrates with these Wildwood adventures, he has the ability to move beyond a "Fifty Shades of Narnia" tribute to a more fully realized narrative that blends the quirk and tremolo of Portland with the immersive pleasures of fantasy literature. -- J. David Santen Jr.

Reading: Meloy and Ellis discuss "Under Wildwood" at 4 p.m. Sept. 23 at the Bagdad Theater, 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Tickets are $17.99 and include a copy of the book. Tickets are available at the Bagdad Theater, the Crystal Ballroom, online at Etix.com, or by phone at 855-227-8499.